I would tend to agree with you guys on the principle, however that's just the way the OS was designed.

On the note of Java being slow, I should point out that originally I was dead against it for making games having experienced it long ago in my own attempts to learn it's language. Times since then have certainly changed however and taking full advantage of OpenGL/OpenGL ES has seemed to help it a lot. All apps on all your Android phones are a testament to how improved performance has been in Java bytecode. Minecraft is another example of efficient and fast Java. (considering all the data and chunks of network data it has to deal with)

I think that the idea that Java is too slow for games is an old idea and if the VM that runs it is fast, so too will be the game/app that it runs on. Case in point Another World is written in interpreted code and it ran extremely well on old DOS and Amiga computers.

A lot of technology that we used to think just stunk has seemed to have gotten a lot better over that last 10 years.